Making War Again

The United States made war in Yemen again over the weekend. A drone strike hit a wedding party, killing 14 civilians in the al Baithar province, guaranteeing that the United States has made upwards of 100 to 150 brand-new implacable enemies among the surviving relatives, who will tell this horrible story about the United States to their children, and their children will tell their children, and we will be forced to make war in Yemen again and again.

The convoy consisted of 11 vehicles, and the officials said that four of the vehicles were targeted in the strikes. Two of the vehicles were completely damaged. Among the killed were two prominent tribal leaders within the province. Residents in Radda were outraged about the attack and called on the Yemeni government to put an end of drone strikes in their region. "More than 50 innocent civilians in our town have been killed by drones," said Abdullah al-Kabra, an eyewitness to the drone strike. "All those who were killed were supportive of the governments anti-terror campaign. That will surely not be the case of their tribes and families if the government does not strongly intervene," he added.

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Intent follows the bullet. There is no such thing as a "mistaken" killing in the kind of war we are making in places like Yemen. There are merely killings we don't give a fuck whether we commit or not. That is the nature of making calculated war from a cold distance, which is what we are doing. There are no accidents. The victims are anonymous because the weapons that killed them are anonymous. That is what happens when you make war in a place while pretending that you're not.

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It's past time to take this lethal program out of the hands of the bunglers and dreamers at CIA and put it back in the hands of the conventional military, which seems to have a better understanding of the nature of making war in a place. The president wanted to do this, and yet, the Agency is still firing off drones and hitting wedding parties and telling us how safe it is keeping us by creating generations of children who will grow up to hate us as death-dealing monsters from the sky.

The outcome has significant implications for U.S. counterterrorism strategy, as well as the CIA's identity. The agency, which rarely carried out lethal operations during most of its history(Ed. Note: "rarely" is a relative term here, as the Allende and Mossadegh and Arbenz families would agree.), was transformed into a paramilitary force over the past 12 years, with its own fleet of armed aircraft. Since 2004, the United States has launched 433 drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, according to the Long War Journal Web site. The CIA has carried out the vast majority of them, killing more than 2,200 militants and as many as 400 civilians in Pakistan alone, according to a recent report by a United Nations human rights investigator. U.S. officials have insisted that the civilian casualty count is far lower but have never released a figure.

It is insulting to pretend that a drone strike that blows up a wedding party is somehow a covert activity. Enough with the grand planners in their cubicles at Langley. If we must have this program, give it back to the soldiers, many of whom have at least enough sense to know that, when you make war in a place, no killing is accidental, and no damage is truly collateral.